Lives in transit

As trains thunder overhead, a flood-displaced family waits to return home.

It’s Saturday. The sun is out. It has been out for a day or two now, but today’s sun feels different. It’s brighter, warmer. It feels like a promise. Some of the streets are dry – they’re dull and grey, the way we like it, and not black and shiny, the way they’ve been for what appears an eternity now. They have no memory of the morning’s rains – and there have been rains since the big deluge of Monday decided it had had enough. This morning. Sometime around midnight. Most frighteningly, last afternoon, when, for an hour or so, it appeared that it was beginning all over again. But it stopped after a while. These on and off showers always seem to stop after a while. And at least some of us have stopped being afraid of them. We treat them like regular rains. We wait it out. Then we set out. The rains of Monday were different. They weren’t even rains. We’ll have to invent a new word for something of that magnitude, something that monstrous.

But though the skies seem clear, the earth tells a different story. People from other parts of Chennai, other parts of Tamil Nadu, will tell you other stories. Thousands of them are still marooned in little concrete islands, previously known as apartment buildings. The water around is ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist-deep, neck-deep. Today’s sun isn’t enough to make it all magically go away. Ground-floor flats are submerged, and the people who lived there are on the first floor, with neighbours they may not even have gotten along with. But battles over loud television sets keeping you awake at night – First World problems, some might say – are no longer important, especially when many of those television sets have been warped by water and will never play anything again. At the other end of the economic spectrum, you have those who lived in huts that no longer exist. Many of these people have moved to schools, marriage halls, malls, cinema theatres, paradisiacal hotels they could not dream of entering earlier.

And then you have someone like forty-five-year-old Rajeswari, who exists somewhere in between, somewhere between rich and poor, have and have-not. Till the rains came, she belonged to a household with a monthly income of Rs. 25,000. Her husband Chandran, a year older, brought home Rs. 8000 – he works in an electrical shop in Mylapore. Their older son works as a mason in the numerous under-construction buildings that have been singled out as one of the major causes of this disaster. Now, he’s unemployed. No one’s building anything till they can gauge the extent of damage on whatever they’re building. The middle son works as a private driver, Rs. 12000 a month. Minus the rent – Rs. 8000 for a two-bedroom flat in Velachery, plus change for utilities – there was about Rs. 15000 to run the household. They had a television set, a fridge, a washing machine. It wasn’t a bad life.

Today, Rajeswari and her family are at the Indira Nagar station of the Mass Rapid Transit System, the elevated local railway line operated by Southern Railways. Their possessions: the clothes on them, plus the sheet they sleep on, part of a banner that once advertised the Kaizen 4M checklist for manufacturing industries: “Men, Machines, Material, Method.” Since the rains began around Deepavali, Rajeswari’s house has been water-logged. The first bout of rains left the family ankle-deep in water. In the next spell, the water rose to the knees. But they could still sit on the three beds at home. Then, Monday happened. 119.73 centimeters of rain, breaking a 100-year-old record – and all hell broke loose.

The water kept rising. The sons created an island by putting one bed on top of another, and when the water still kept rising, the third bed was put on top. Chandran said it was worse outside, near the gate – in his words, the water level was one-and-a-half-men deep. He used his height as a measure – he stands at about five-foot-four, though his crutches make him look smaller. His right leg was maimed in 1998, when a lorry rammed into his bicycle. He was admitted to Stanley Hospital, where he met one of those lawyers who swoop in on “accident cases.” The lawyer said he could go to court. He did. Five years later, he received compensation from the transport company: Rs. 5.25 lakh. After paying off the lawyer and others, Chandran took his family to his hometown – Tiruvannamalai, about 190 kilometres from Chennai – and, with the Rs. 3 lakh that remained, he set up a shop that sold bead ornaments. He lost money and the family moved to Puducherry, where Chandran manned an STD phone booth. That didn’t work either. Finally, the family moved back to Chennai. Finally, things began to look up.

For three days, Chandran and his grandchildren – three-year-old Ritish, one-and-a-half-year-old Hari – sat on the loft, beside the television set that was rescued from rising waters and laid face-down. But Rajeswari and the others needed to keep moving. Milk had to be boiled for the children, meals needed to be prepared on the pump stove kept on a high shelf made higher with bricks from a nearby construction site. So Rajeswari would descend into chest-deep water, sometimes pushing away the odd snake. Then she’d go back up. On the fourth day, she knew this couldn’t continue. On one of the rare times it wasn’t raining, she went to the terrace and saw a boat. Chandran and the children were packed off to Indira Nagar. (The ride to the nearest road that wasn’t water-logged cost Rs. 100, pretty cheap given the circumstances, and given the city’s experience with grotesquely inflated auto-rickshaw rates.) They used to live there before they moved to Velachery, and their old neighbour – the owner of a tea shop – was happy to have them. Thursday night, Rajeswari and her sons decided there was no use sticking around. The washing machine was under water, as was the fridge. Whatever was in the almirahs was wet as well. What was there to steal? Besides, the neighbours had left long ago. So they took a boat and left too.

They’ve been at Indira Nagar since. They’re not the only ones in an MRTS station. The Chintadripet station is filled with hundreds of people. This morning, they were queuing up because mats and blankets were being distributed. But Rajeswari and her family seem to be the only flood victims in Indira Nagar during the day. At night, they move to the friend’s house, just behind the station. They have no money, but food isn’t a problem. Last night, a policeman gave them chapattis. This morning, two college students from Triplicane, Srinivas and Prakash, came by on bikes and dropped off food and supplies: cartons of upma, a one-litre sachet of Thirumala milk (the government-owned brand, Aavin, has just resumed supply, and sachets are vanishing like magic), Good Day biscuits, and candles.

The boys got together with friends and pooled in money – a couple of hundred here, a couple of hundred there – to buy the milk and biscuits and candles. The upma, though, was made this morning in Sri Raghavendra Mandapam, a marriage hall in Triplicane. A lot of it was picked up by volunteers doing relief work in Tambaram, Mylapore and Velachery. Srinivas (a final-year Engineering student at Panimalar Institute of Technology) and Prakash (B.Com. at DG Vaishnav College) decided to cover other areas, like these railway stations, which, like Rajeswari’s family, fall somewhere in the middle, neither homes nor relief camps. Yesterday, Srinivas and Prakash attended the wedding of a friend, someone who, like many in the city, must have decided that enough is enough, that life must go on. They asked if they could have the leftover food, which they then distributed in places like Chintadripet and Aminjikarai. Today is their first day here. Their streets weren’t affected by the rains, they said, underlining how unfair the rains must have seemed to people like Rajeswari. It’s not just that they lost everything. There were others who lost nothing.

Thirty-seven-year-old Gandhi Nagar resident Mohammed Sharif also comes bearing food. He hasn’t had power from Tuesday morning. Supply was restored just last night. That means the minute things became some kind of normal again, his wife prepared some rice, chopped potatoes and made a curry, and he packed all of this into boxes and came here. But his voluntary work isn’t flood-related. He’s been doing this for a year now. Whenever he gets time off from his job (an IT company in Taramani), he and his wife prepare food that he packs into foil containers he purchases at Parry’s Corner. He then makes his rounds, distributing this food to the less-fortunate who aren’t always visible – like Rajeswari, like the man further down whose name no one knows and who keeps to himself.

Rajeswari is thankful to have people – these boys, this man – looking out for her, but she wants to go back home. The worst, after all, seems to be over. The streetlights have come back on. At least some kind of mobile connectivity is back, even if people claim to be on top of water tanks as they make their calls and reconnect with friends and family. But she cannot go back until the water goes. Tomorrow, her older son will go to their street in Velachery and see how things are. It’s not going to be easy. The TVS-50 which Chandran rode to work will have to be resurrected from whatever being underwater does to mopeds. And the electrical shop was underwater too, so he may not even have a place to go back to work to. But for now, just some sense of permanence would be a start.

I watched, like millions of others did, on a television screen, as the deluge finally became national news. Did my bit by adding to the relief funds being collected by my bank; I couldn’t do more. Relatives were trapped as well, living upstairs while the ground floor was waterlogged, stranded in high-rise apartments while the waters rose higher and higher – and when I could get in touch, they all said the same thing – they had been without power for days, couldn’t go anywhere, or buy anything but they were more fortunate than others who could ill afford to lose the little they had.

It’s been a hard time for those in TN. I hope things are looking up and that the relief funds do the job they are supposed to do.

Joseph: Dear Mr. Rangan, Your article in today’s THE HINDU, is a very touching one – Raheswari comes alive and touches the cords at the bottom of the heart.

I have been in development work for more that 2 and 1/2 decades now – have been part of several disasters – including the last year’s Kashmir Floods. From my experience I have seen a more positive and supportive neighbour in Chennai than in many other flood situations. I can imagine the politics being played out at the higher levels and corridors of power in the days to come (its started to some extent), but for the woman and man of the street – the unsung heros and Rajeswari – hats off!!!!

Nakul: Hello, This is with reference to your article on the Chennai floods. Rampant concretization, lack of green spaces, grassy lands, open areas and sprawling but chaotic suburbs add to rain woes in today’s India if one takes waterlogging as a precursor to flooding risk.

Construction needs to factor in open spaces into a city’s plan. If this is how a metropolitan city is, imagine the utter lack of planning in smaller towns.

Little India in Singapore is a perfect example of Tamil society with enforced guidelines in town planning.

Anand: Brilliantly written. And this is precisely the point. Rajeswari did not quite have a choice on where to live. For anyone who is aspiring and cannot afford to commute, proximity to work is the key. It is in the nature of things that low lying Korattur and Villivakkam will be next to Padi and Perambur where there are jobs. Or for Velachery to come up near Adyar IT corridor and Guindy.

If one ignores the floods and looks at Rajeswari, her family enjoys a lifestyle that middle class aspired for in the 1980s – to have a TV, a bed, a fridge and a washing machine – 40 years ago a mason, a driver, a helper in a small shop were struggling to get food and wear decent clothes. They get this because the city is an aggregator of demand for services and is prepared to pay more. Proximity to work matters. One can’t live 100 feet above the ground in Chengleput and have a job in a construction project in OMR road. While hundreds of thousands are displaced in a once in a hundred year flood, they could not made a living had it not been for the expanding Chennai.

So market forces work for its own reasons – the job of the regulators is to interfere enough to ensure that larger harm does not occur, such as keeping Pallikaranai marshlands and other remaining wetlands free or ensure that only treated waters enter the Muthukadu backwaters. And may be to allow for more high rises to come up like in Mumbai in central Chennai so that the pressures on the suburbia reduces. And it is time to build a balancing reservoir which is insulated from inflows except for excess water to be pumped into this reservoir.

Great write up. As a Mumbaiite with a huge extended family in Chennai, I lost my peace of mind as I watched the scenes relayed by news channels on Wednesday and Thursday. At first it reminded us of the floods we experienced every year in far flung Kalyan (with snakes climbing up close to the balcony grills 🙂 ). Then we realised this was turning into something much worse; even in the worst episodes of rain-curfews in Mumbai we have never dreaded running out of supplies. It was in a way a relief when I saw your blog being updated (don’t remember if it was on Thursday and Friday) since that meant (or did it?) at least some parts of the city had power and were not so badly affected.

Was wondering if you were going to write something on this. Thanks for a very brilliant piece written with heart. Hope the people of this city recover soon and retain their bigheartedness.

And also learn somethings for future. One story I heard was that a few bright people got the bunds in a large lake blown with bombs to save their factory from submerging and it flooded the adjacent village with water upto 8 feet and left the lake dry. Water storage body gone in a matter of hours. Sigh.

Maybe the political and other showboats need to fade away soon so the real recovery can start!

It is disheartening to hear of the loss of life (and property). The scale of loss makes it worse. Rains (which, normally are on the wish list of the common folk of Chennai) have upended the lives of many Chennaiites. Despite the creeping self-absorption and cool indifference of modern life (and city life in particular), what is heartening is the act of caring and compassion from many quarters (ordinary citizens and stars), mostly local. From what one hears and reads, the rains, even if temporarily, dissolved the many divides. Those that have reached out from within (& outside) in different ways during this crisis simply deserve the wholehearted thanks of Chennaiites and kindred spirits. Hopefully, the goodwill sustains long enough for the entire city to get back on its feet!

Madan: About the power thing, I was basically coming to work even if it meant a two-hour journey — simply because that meant you had power and wifi. You were connected. Sitting at home, you had no clue what was happening.

Brangan: I can relate to that – the feeling of not knowing what’s happening. But two hours, damn, that’s painful. One of my uncles actually had to be brought home by boat – think this was Thursday night or maybe the night before. It’s when I read his updates (he reported six feet of water in one of the main roads) that I felt really scared. Because he doesn’t live along ECR or Oragadam or any of those places, just good ol’ CIT Nagar.